Should you expect & accept for everything you speak in public to be recorded and monitored? Is it "fair game" to do facial recognition on everybody that shows their face "in public"?
You're "tweeting" to your followers and random people that happen upon your feed can read it too, just as some random person sitting on a bench in the park would hear you speak. I don't believe that most people (normal people, that is, not professional pundits that use Twitter) are fully aware that they are "completely public" most of the time. They'll likely "know" if you ask them, but they'll use Twitter as if it's an extended group chat a lot of the time: they don't expect that the world is watching/can watch.
There's probably a cultural component to what side of this one comes down to, how much privacy you can expect (and be granted by law) in public spaces is different between countries.
When I'm done speaking, I'm done speaking. The moment has passed. I know the information is now safe unless my friends share it.
I don't have to worry about someone seeing a crude joke made 10 years ago and starting a massive deplatformization campaign against me in the name of social justice.
When I make a post, it's there forever.
I know your analogy seems to make sense, but these two phenomenon are incompatible. You cannot translate this digital phenomenon to that physical phenomenon.
> You cannot translate this digital phenomenon to that physical phenomenon.
I agree, they aren't the same in that regard. The expectation is similar, that's what I was trying to say. When people make a crude joke or call somebody an asshole on Twitter, they don't expect that to be read by everybody.
Somebody compared a public post to standing on a soap box. If you're standing on a soap box, you expect what you say to be heard publicly. I believe that's primarily because you usually don't stand on a soap box, so being that exposed really stands out. If everybody stood on a soap box all the time because the floor is lava and soap boxes are heat resistant, that would quickly change and people wouldn't associate a soap box with "public". The early days of social media certainly had that, it was new and everybody was acutely aware of it. That changes with exposure, now it's no longer an outlet to let the public know about your opinion, it's a chat where you talk one on one or in small groups (for most users, very few have large followings and get a lot of visibility) to friends and strangers alike. Having some tweet go viral is the equivalent of some reporter overhearing your private conversation and mentioning what a vile person you are in his column.
> When people make a crude joke or call somebody an asshole on Twitter, they don't expect that to be read by everybody.
If we're keeping up with analogies, that's like saying someone doesn't expect what they say on a soap box to be heard by anyone. That's a false expectation, however.
We have to strike a balance between ideology and pragmatism. The best compromise is likely preventing the government from having access to data we consider private, while understanding anything on the other side of the line is fair game and accessible to friends, family, politicians, corporations, and historians alike.
The only way we can achieve this is by limiting what can be done with this data aka fixing the US government. We cannot, for example, have public or inferred health data used to prevent people from attaining health insurance.
> If we're keeping up with analogies, that's like saying someone doesn't expect what they say on a soap box to be heard by anyone. That's a false expectation, however.
That's my point. If "soap box speaking" was as common as tweeting or posting on Facebook or speaking to a friend in a pub, people wouldn't expect it to be different. When social media changed from "technology pioneers use it carefully" to "everybody uses it and rarely thinks twice before hitting send", the expectation of the average user shifts.
> while understanding anything on the other side of the line is fair game
I do agree: Fair game for any person. As soon as technology enters the game (scrapers, databases etc), it changes. Similarly, you can sit in a park and catch fragments of what the people walking by talk about, that's all right. If you're using a directional microphone to listen in on people on the other side of the park, that's not. A user doesn't expect to the target of a microphone or a webscraper/data mining operation.
> Fair game means fair game. It means its open for anyone.
In that case, you're allowed to remotely listen in on everyone as long as they're in a public space.
> If people don't expect this, it's because they don't understand it.
Absolutely, and because everything is done so that they either don't understand it, or quickly forget it. Change Twitter's send button to "I want everyone, including my enemies, the government, journalists and my mother to read this" ... and you'll pretty much kill Twitter.
> Let's work on educating people instead of warping reality around the ignorant.
The ignorant make up the majority. We can't educate everybody about machine learning to the required degree where they can make an informed decision about it. The same goes for financial instruments or law. Instead, we just outlaw the most egregious transgressions ("no, it said on page 277 of the contract that we get all the money he'll ever make in return for this bicycle") and base what's allowed on what a reasonable person would expect.
Making a public post is like standing on a soap box in the park. If you and I go to the pub and I tell you that the Mayor is a crook, then that's between us. If I stand on a soap box and shout that the Mayor is a crook then that's slander and I should either have to prove it or I should be sanctioned.
And yet, once the technology is mature enough (it may already be, just not that cheap too deploy yet), I'm sure the government will integrate CCTV cameras with microphones that can listen in on private conversations between individuals and analyze that in real-time.
I'm also sure the government will shamelessly make the argument that because you're telling something to a friend in a "public place" it means it's not a private conversation, so it's fair game for mass-collection and real-time analysis. It may have already made this argument in some court cases, but I don't recall exactly.
Similarly, your private Facebook posts are already compromised.
What the court does is muddy the distinction between a theoretical reasonable expectation of privacy and the actual expectation of privacy resulting from how things currently are.
As in, I expect conversations in my car to be private, but if all cars had microphones with cell connections my government would argue that I can't expect privacy because clearly my environment already has privacy-compromising features. [0]
It's cyclical and deceitful and until we stop playing ball and change the language, the farce will continue.
To me the issue is proportionality and scale - for example if one person a year out of 100M is suspected of plotting to introduce a killer virus to the general population then (provided the suspicion is reasonable based on evidence) I feel that very few people would object to this kind of surveillance. No more than they would object to the idea that you might be talking directly to someone who has decided to become a federal witness in order to stop you.
On the other hand if the government turns on all connections and starts to bulk process all of them to find "interesting" discussions, and then complies dossiers based on these which are then used to determine probabilities of behaviours... and issue sanctions, constraints and awards based on these.. Well. My bet is that almost everyone would object.
Somewhere between these two extremes, absolute surveillance and extremely limited state power lies the correct position. My own view is that it should be much closer to the limited position than state omniscience, the core question is do you want freedom, or do you want safety. In the modern world you (I, anyone) can't have an absolute of both. Absolute freedom would result in the dominance of lunatics with assault rifles (cf. anywhere in the modern world where state power collapses). Absolute safety means that your neighbours and family will regularly face state sanction - even if by some chance you don't.
The fly in the ointment is that I fear that state omniscience is stable in that a society run in that way could continue indefinitely. On the other hand the extreme of liberty (given assault rifles) is clearly not sustainable (in that school, hospital, roads, power, water, cannot be delivered). So we may see a world in which a core territory (China) is run by big brother and a periphery (to steal William Gibson's term) is allowed to seethe and boil in anarchy.
To avoid this we need to develop civil society and generally learn to get along with each other, and we need to punctuate this with action to lock up lunatics and psychos who are taking advantage of us. We also need to find a way to neutralise a core that is seeking to actively destabilise the periphery. Interestingly I think that HN is one of the very few places where this kind of action can be developed.
This is legitimate if the people being watched have bona fide suspicion of criminal intent, and if the extent of surveillance is proportionate to the social threat.
